To quote Alex Scaggs of FT:
Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate.
It’s all drunk monkeys driving a train… there is no economic theory to expect consistency from.
“Belief” or “dogma” or even “idea” would work, but there’s no logic in that claim.
There’s not even a policy goal. If the intent is to convert the US from a net importer to neutral or even a net exporter, it means our cost of production needs to be about average. Which means our populace’s quality of life needs to be about average; wealthy countries are more expensive to produce in. Mix in the supposed interest in economic and social liberty, and you’ve got a country trying to destroy its own wealth in the name of controlling what its freedom-loving citizens buy
There is no logic here. It’s drunk monkeys all the way down.
1. Why do you believe this is true?
2. Why do you believe that 0 trade deficits are a good thing?
> Besides, what do you do with a country where US is a net exporter? Provide subsidies for imports?
In this instance, I believe the thought pattern is: "we're being smart here".
Once people accept that this administration is very much like the Russian regime, where everyone is the type of person playing to an aesthetic, you see this stuff coming miles away.
This is what these sorts of people would do.
(Freshly made Sri Lankian tea is the best, IMHO! I mean, proper tea, not all these grasses, berries and synthetic aromas which are named "tea" in modern western world).
But really best "black" tea of my life (and I spent most of my life in country with strong tea culture, where loose tea and teapots are still very popular, and not, it is not UK!) was bough at random tea factory in the middle of nowhere in Sri Lanka, packed in simple 1kg vacuum bags. No brand, no name, only date of picking (two days ago) and packing (today at the day of bought) :-)
It shouldn't be called tea if it is not from a very selective small area of Hangzhou. You've never tasted real tea in your entire life, what a pity.
They also have some of GPs favorite: https://www.whittard.com/all/ceylon-orange-pekoe-loose-tea-p...
Ok, Germany or Netherlands never were known for tea tradition, but UK was THE Tea country. UK created Assam, Darjeeling, Ceylon teas in the first place! How did this happen?
To be honest, I've tried many red teas from China and all of them... Very Chinese.
It is not bad at all (some of them are very interesting!, but it is other style compared to Ceylon, Darjeeling and Assam teas (which are not the same too, but close to each other than to Chinese red tea).
Different styles of green ad white teas I like too, but as specialty, not on as day-to-day many-time-a-day go-to drink.
Not true, China's is on top of its existing tariffs.
It's mind-boggling because the US has been trying very very hard to pull Sri Lanka away from China for a decade now
influence for sure. But trade? Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia already have ~40% of their imports from China and 5% or so from the US, I don't think this tariff can realistically increase trade between China and SEA countries much.
Is that from a decrease in demand, or an increase in supply from other countries? I'm curious what the price elasticity of demand looks like for Chinese imports.
I understand 6% of china may be a much higher percentage of, say, Vietnam's export, but I just don't think Vietnam can produce that much more of that, quickly.
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...
For Vietnam: China: 32.79%, US: 4.04%
Cambodia's top 3 is China 42%, Thailand 20%, Vietnam 12%
Thailand's is China 28.7%, Japan 10.2%, US 6.3%
Vietnam's is China 40.8%, South Korea 15.9%, Japan 5%
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/116/export-basket
You don't want to buy anything? You don't need anything? The British had one thing the Chinese "needed".
And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins).
Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor?
Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.
In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.
Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?
Are you feeling great again, Americans?
Can you elaborate? Tried searching for it, all i found is that Kazakhstan reported 500M exports to Germany, when it was actually 7B. But you were talking about Exports from Germany to Kazakhstan, which I wasn't able to find.
In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.
For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.
Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.
It must be the correct one then. :-)
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.
Doge should look into this inefficiency.
So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
Joke of the month.
Only barely four years left, yaaaay!
Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.
Which might explain why the British Indian Ocean Territory - population, one US military base - has such a high tariff. The BIOT, aka Diego Garcia, has the ccTLD .io.
The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
Even the UK gets 10% which is truly mad given we have balanced trade and tarrifs (if anything the US tariffed the UK more than they did them).
^So essentially MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports)
The EO and Annexes are not on the Federal Register website yet but on the Whitehouse website it has EO[1] and Annex I[2] and Annex II[3].
I do not see Russia or Ukraine mentioned in any of those so I would assume both get the base "10 percent" under section 2/3.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...
[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...
Also imposing high tariffs now would reduce the power of the threat to raise tarrifs: https://www.ft.com/content/ec99b3c2-9f4d-4f34-9a01-f97d98131...
So is Iran, and yet Iran is still on the list.
The others make sense since they have worse tarrifs (though different, yes)
But then, I have no idea if the reasonable explanation applies. Are the other countries not in the list Iran and Cuba?
The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.
Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed.
It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-...
I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.
It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so.
So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
Should have set that to 99% then eh?
With the tariffs in Asia (Vietnam: 46%, Thailand: 36%, Cambodia: 49%) it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well.